Signifying Trauma in the Post-9/11 Combat Film: The Hurt Locker and In the Valley of Elah

Abstract

Since the events of 11 September 2001, an extensive range of genres increasingly feature traumatized protagonists. However, there are acknowledged difficulties in trying to recreate the actual experience of trauma on screen [Walker, J. 2005. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley and London: University of California Press]. Slavoj Žižek [2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London and New York: Verso] explores this dilemma through an extension of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and places trauma in a category termed ‘the Real’ as a form that is resistant to symbolization. This article examines the signification of trauma in two post-9/11 combat films and considers how they enable an understanding of war trauma through the insertion of visuals which construct their respective narratives as traumatic memory, thereby bringing the viewer closer to Žižek’s concept of the traumatic Real.

KEYWORDS:

• trauma
• post-9/11 combat film
• The Hurt Locker
• In the Valley of Elah
• Slavoj Žižek
• the Real

Notes on contributor

Fran Pheasant-Kelly is MA Film and Screen Course Leader and Reader in Screen Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Her research centres on American film, including fantasy and science fiction, terrorism and post-9/11 cinema, space, science and abjection. She is the author of numerous publications including two monographs, Abject Spaces in American Cinema: Institutions, Identity and Psychoanalysis in Film (IB Tauris 2013) and Fantasy Film Post 9/11 (Palgrave 2013), and the co-editor of Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind the Screen Door (Routledge 2015). She is currently working on a third monograph entitled The Bodily Turn in Film and Television and a co-edited collection (with Stella Hockenhull) titled Tim Burton’s Bodies.